WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: what to do when CMS doesn't support table caption or <tfootr>

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Nov 3, 2011 10:27AM

On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 9:13 AM, Angela French < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> Would anyone be able to provide me links to real examples of <tfoot> in use so I can get some practical examples in my mind?

Think of it this way - <tfoot> is simply a way to have the headers of
a table also appear at the bottom of the table. This is usually only
of use for very long tables - and primarily when a long table is
printed so that the footers appear at the bottom of each printed page.
This is a rare usage - and even then, of questionable utility. If you
use <tfoot>, you must have <tbody>. And in HTML <5, the <tfoot> must
come before the <tbody> in markup, which means it will probably be
read by screen readers before the data - potentially very confusing.

Most of the examples I found are not very complete or are wrong. It's
no wonder there's so much confusion. The table markup at
http://www.webtoolkit.info/scrollable-html-table.html is a good
example.

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_tfoot.asp and
http://www.littlewebhut.com/html/tfoot_tag/ use <tfoot> a little
differently - to provide a summary/totals of column data. I suppose
this works, though if the table were split across pages, it could be
very confusing to have the totals appear somewhere in the middle of
the data table.

All things considered, I've seen VERY few cases where <tfoot> or
<thead> are worth the effort. Again, they do nothing for accessibility
- they are primarily semantics for semantics sake.

Jared